Failing schools and a battle for Britain
This was the day the British education Establishment’s 50-year betrayal of the nation’s children lay starkly exposed in all its ignominy.
After testing 166,000 people in 24 education systems, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development finds that England’s young adults are among the least literate and numerate in the industrialised world.
Shockingly, the study also reveals that ours is the only developed country in which 16 to 24-year-olds – schooled under Labour and boasting the most impressive paper qualifications ever – perform no better than their parents’ generation, aged 55 to 65.
It has emerged that England's young adults are among the least literate and numerate in the industrialised world
Indeed, after social background is
taken into account, the OECD finds attainment has gone into reverse.
(And how tragic that England, once renowned for its social mobility, is
now the country in which poor children are most likely to be trapped in
their parents’ income bracket.)
Could there be any more conclusive indictment of decades of trendy educational theories, failed attempts at social engineering, dumbed-down exams and endless, politically correct tinkering with the curriculum?
This is a battle the Education Secretary Michael Gove must win- it is about national economic survival
What is unforgivable is that so many in the Establishment cling to the exploded ideas of the 1960s, blind to the damage they have done.
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Only last week, more than 200 educationalists and children’s authors signed an open letter, urging Michael Gove to suspend his courageous efforts to refocus relentlessly on the three Rs and bring back rigour to exams.
This is a battle the Education Secretary must win. For it shouldn’t take the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher to remind us of the ‘serious economic implications’ of our educational failure, in a world where a skilled workforce is everything.
Indeed, it is a battle for national economic survival.
It was billed as the electronic wonder that would finally prevent terrorists, foreign criminals and illegal immigrants from setting foot in this country.
Yet ten years on, the £1.2billion ‘e-borders’ computer system has proved a catastrophic failure, missing most of its objectives and leaving gaping holes in the protections it promised to deliver.
Why is it that every IT scheme touched by the public sector – from the £20billion wasted by the NHS to the £100million squandered on the BBC’s aborted digital media project – seems to crumble to dust?
Indeed, the e-borders system fails on almost every level. It can’t count people in or out. Technical problems mean people arriving on ferries, Eurostar, cruise ships and small planes escape screening.
Meanwhile, alerts about criminals are often missed, while 650,000 records of drugs and other smuggled goods have been deleted without even being read.
To cap it all, some 70million passengers a year – that’s one in three – arrive without background checks of any kind because of the EU’s data protection rules.
What with technical incompetence, bureaucratic bungling and meddling from Brussels, doesn’t it sometimes seem that officialdom has a death-wish for Britain’s welfare and security?
Corrupt Afghan President Hamid Karzai may have a point when he says Nato’s involvement in his country has caused ‘a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because Afghanistan is not secure’.
But with more than 2,700 American and British troops lying dead for his cause – and thousands more hideously injured – his smirking ingratitude is beneath civilisation’s contempt.